In the run up to the launch of Battlemage, book 1 of the Age of Darkness trilogy, there’s going to be a lot of PR and marketing going on. My name and the book cover is going to be popping up all over the place. Plus those clever people at Orbit have some great ideas for promotion.

In the meantime, Matthew in Australia over at the Smash Dragons blog, got in there first with a fairly lengthy interview. No doubt the first of many. I go into a fair bit of detail about the book, my process, where the inspiration came from, who some of my influences and some other fun stuff. You can read the interview in full here.

He also has some great interviews with some other authors who I highly recommend. I’ve read their work and can genuinely say I’m a big fan. These include Jen Williams, whose first two books (The Copper Promise and The Iron Ghost) are cracking rollicking fantasy adventures that are funny and clever and weird and just a lot of fun. I never use text speech or text abbreviations but her books did actually make me laugh out loud when reading them which is actually pretty rare. I think it comes from her acerbic charming sense of humour.

The other author I can recommend is Daniel Polansky. His fantasy books are crime novels in a fantasy skin as they are told from the perspective of people from the underworld but there is also plenty of magic and mayhem. A very unique style, an interesting approach and in some ways his books remind me of Tale of the Kin novels by Douglas Hulick.